Most business presenters focus on their projectors. After all, there are meaningful differences between projectors and, when you're on the road, you probably can't control your projection surface, but you can control your projector. Back at your primary office, though, you can control what kind of screen you use and, believe it or not, the type of screen that you have installed makes a really big difference in the quality of the image that any projector throws.

White Screens

Most projector screens are white. A perfectly white screen should reflect back all of the light that the projector casts at it without introducing any changes in its brightness or its color balance. It generally gives a bright and clear image and is viewable from a large range of angles.

Gray Screens

One of the problems with many business projectors is that, in an attempt to make their image as bright as possible, they end up projecting blacks as gray, reducing the contrast of the image and making dark scenes in projected videos look muddy. In an attempt to solve this problem, some screen manufacturers make screens that are gray. This surface color darkens the overall image. Because of the way that the human visual system perceives light, the image consequently appears to have more contrast in dark scenes.

Pros and Cons

Generally speaking, a white screen provides you with a brighter image. However, if you have a particularly bright projector that performs poorly in dark areas, a gray screen will give you better image quality. This generally becomes more important if you are projecting video and movies as opposed to spreadsheets, graphs and presentation slides.

Gain -- The Other Factor

Another factor that impacts your screen's performance is its gain. Gain refers to how much of the light that is reflected on the screen gets back to the viewer. A matte white screen should have a gain of 1.0, while a matte gray screen typically has a gain of less than one. Some screens have reflective elements that increase their gain, allowing them to seemingly send more light back to the audience than they receive from the projector. They do this by limiting their viewing angle so that people that are oriented straight-on get a bright image while those on the sides get a dimmer picture. A high-gain gray screen can give you the best of both worlds -- rich blacks with a bright picture.

References

About the Author

Solomon Poretsky has been writing since 1996 and has been published in a number of trade publications including the "Minnesota Real Estate Journal" and "Minnesota Multi-Housing Association Advocate." He holds a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, from Columbia University and has extensive experience in the fields of financial services, real estate and technology.